Geoffrey Everest Hinton
[ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: ] (born 6 December 1947) is a
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
-
Canadian
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source o ...
cognitive psychologist
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which he ...
and
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...
, most noted for his work on
artificial neural networks
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected uni ...
. Since 2013, he has divided his time working for
Google (
Google Brain) and the
University of Toronto. In 2017, he co-founded and became the Chief Scientific Advisor of the
Vector Institute in Toronto.
With
David Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...
and
Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularized the
backpropagation
In machine learning, backpropagation (backprop, BP) is a widely used algorithm for training feedforward artificial neural networks. Generalizations of backpropagation exist for other artificial neural networks (ANNs), and for functions gene ...
algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks,
[ although they were not the first to propose the approach.] Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning
Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
D ...
community. The dramatic image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet
AlexNet is the name of a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, designed by Alex Krizhevsky in collaboration with Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, who was Krizhevsky's Ph.D. advisor.
AlexNet competed in the ImageNet Large Scale Vis ...
designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky
Alex Krizhevsky is a Ukrainian-born Canadian computer scientist most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. Shortly after having won the ImageNet challenge in 2012 with AlexNet, he and his colleagues sold their star ...
and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012 was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision.
Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...
, together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun
Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning", and have continued to give public talks together.
Education
Hinton was educated at King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the cit ...
, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology.[ He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a ]Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
in 1978 for research supervised by Christopher Longuet-Higgins
Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins (April 11, 1923 – March 27, 2004) was a British scholar and teacher. He was the Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge for 13 years until 1967 when he moved to the University of Edin ...
.[
]
Career and research
After his Ph.D., he worked at the University of Sussex and, (after difficulty finding funding in Britain),[ the ]University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...
and Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...
.[ He was the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at ]University College London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = � ...
[ and ][https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/fullcv.pdf ] a professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair
Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program.
Program goals
The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...
in Machine Learning and is currently an advisor for the ''Learning in Machines & Brains'' program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is s ...
. Hinton taught a free online course on Neural Networks on the education platform Coursera
Coursera Inc. () is a U.S.-based massive open online course provider founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, ...
in 2012. Hinton joined Google in March 2013 when his company, DNNresearch Inc., was acquired. He is planning to "divide his time between his university research and his work at Google".
Hinton's research investigates ways of using neural networks for machine learning, memory, perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
and symbol processing. He has authored or co-authored over 200 peer reviewed publications. At the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeuRIPS) 2022, Hinton introduced a new learning algorithm for neural networks that he calls the "Forward-Forward" algorithm. The idea of the new algorithm is to replace the traditional forward-backward passes of backpropagation with two forward passes, one with positive (i.e. real) data and the other with negative data which could be generated by the network itself.
While Hinton was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...
(1982–1987), David E. Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artifi ...
and Hinton and Ronald J. Williams applied the backpropagation algorithm to multi-layer neural networks. Their experiments showed that such networks can learn useful internal representations of data. In an interview of 2018, Hinton said that "David E. Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artifi ...
came up with the basic idea of backpropagation, so it's his invention." Although this work was important in popularizing backpropagation, it was not the first to suggest the approach. Reverse-mode automatic differentiation
In mathematics and computer algebra, automatic differentiation (AD), also called algorithmic differentiation, computational differentiation, auto-differentiation, or simply autodiff, is a set of techniques to evaluate the derivative of a function ...
, of which backpropagation is a special case, was proposed by Seppo Linnainmaa
Seppo Ilmari Linnainmaa (born 28 September 1945) is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. He was born in Pori. In 1974 he obtained the first doctorate ever awarded in computer science at the University of Helsinki. In 1976, he became Ass ...
in 1970, and Paul Werbos proposed to use it to train neural networks in 1974.
During the same period, Hinton co-invented Boltzmann machine
A Boltzmann machine (also called Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model with external field or stochastic Ising–Lenz–Little model) is a stochastic spin-glass model with an external field, i.e., a Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model, that is a stochastic ...
s with David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski (born 13 August 1947) is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical ...
. His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time delay neural network, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and Product of Experts. In 2007 Hinton coauthored an unsupervised learning paper titled ''Unsupervised learning of image transformations''. An accessible introduction to Geoffrey Hinton's research can be found in his articles in '' Scientific American'' in September 1992 and October 1993.
In October and November 2017 respectively, Hinton published two open access research papers on the theme of capsule neural networks, which according to Hinton are "finally something that works well."
Notable former PhD students and postdoctoral research
A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...
ers from his group include Peter Dayan, Sam Roweis,[ Max Welling,][ Richard Zemel,][ Brendan Frey,][ Radford M. Neal,][ Yee Whye Teh, Ruslan Salakhutdinov,][ Ilya Sutskever,][ ]Yann LeCun
Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, Alex Graves
Alexander John Graves (born July 23, 1965) is an American film director, television director, television producer and screenwriter.
Early life
Alex Graves was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, William Graves, was a reporter for ''The K ...
,[ and Zoubin Ghahramani.
]
Honours and awards
Hinton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1998.[ He was the first winner of the Rumelhart Prize in 2001. His certificate of election for the Royal Society reads:
In 2001, Hinton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He was the 2005 recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award. He has also been awarded the 2011 Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. In 2013, Hinton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Université de Sherbrooke.
In 2016, he was elected a foreign member of National Academy of Engineering "For contributions to the theory and practice of artificial neural networks and their application to speech recognition and computer vision". He also received the 2016 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award.
He has won the ]BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards () are an international award programme recognizing significant contributions in the areas of scientific research and cultural creation. The categories that make up the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ...
(2016) in the Information and Communication Technologies category "for his pioneering and highly influential work" to endow machines with the ability to learn.
Together with Yann LeCun
Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, and Yoshua Bengio, Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...
for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
In 2018, he was awarded a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2022 he received the Princess of Asturias Award
The Princess of Asturias Awards ( es, Premios Princesa de Asturias, links=no, ast, Premios Princesa d'Asturies, links=no), formerly the Prince of Asturias Awards from 1981 to 2014 ( es, Premios Príncipe de Asturias, links=no), are a series of a ...
in the category "Scientific Research", along with Yann LeCun
Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. In his early career he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert player of board games. He is the chief executive officer and ...
.
Personal life
Hinton is the great-great-grandson of the mathematician and educator Mary Everest Boole
Mary Everest Boole (11 March 1832 in Wickwar, Gloucestershire – 17 May 1916 in Middlesex, England) was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as ''Philosophy and Fun of Algebra'', an ...
and her husband, the logician George Boole, whose work eventually became one of the foundations of modern computer science. Another great-great-grandfather was the surgeon and author James Hinton, who was the father of Charles Howard Hinton
Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 30 April 1907) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled ''Scientific Romances''. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining t ...
. Hinton's father was Howard Hinton.[ His middle name comes from another relative, George Everest.] He is the nephew of the economist Colin Clark. He lost his second wife to ovarian cancer in 1994.
Views
Hinton moved from the U.S. to Canada in part due to disillusionment with Ronald Reagan-era politics and disapproval of military funding of artificial intelligence.[
Hinton has petitioned against ]lethal autonomous weapon
Lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) are a type of autonomous military system that can independently search for and engage targets based on programmed constraints and descriptions. LAWs are also known as lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), auto ...
s. Regarding existential risk from artificial intelligence, Hinton typically declines to make predictions more than five years into the future, noting that exponential progress makes the uncertainty too great.
Hinton is optimistic about AI’s impact on the job market: “The phrase ‘artificial general intelligence’ carries with it the implication that this sort of single robot is suddenly going to be smarter than you. I don’t think it’s going to be that. I think more and more of the routine things we do are going to be replaced by AI systems — like the Google Assistant.”
Hinton argues that AGI won’t make humans redundant. Rather, he says, it will remain for the most part myopic in its understanding of the world — at least in the near future. He believes that it’ll continue to improve our lives in small but meaningful ways. “ I in the future isgoing to know a lot about what you’re probably going to want to do and how to do it, and it’s going to be very helpful. But it’s not going to replace you,” he said. “If you took system that was developed to be able to be very good t driving and you sent it on its first date, I think it would be a disaster.” And for dangerous tasks currently performed by humans, that’s a step in the right direction, according to Hinton.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hinton, Geoffrey
Artificial intelligence researchers
British computer scientists
Canadian computer scientists
Companions of the Order of Canada
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Fellows of the Royal Society
Google employees
Living people
Machine learning researchers
University of Toronto faculty
Canada Research Chairs
1947 births
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
Rumelhart Prize laureates
Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
Turing Award laureates
People from Wimbledon, London
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Engineering
Hinton family
Canadian Fellows of the Royal Society